Generic Company Place Holder Panoramas

Helix Interactive's Panoramas allows you to take photos or import them, then stitch them together using a variety of tools, though it takes a rather roundabout and un-intuitve way to do so.

The app is quite powerful—it can combine photos even when they aren’t perfectly aligned—but it requires a bit of work, as users must manually drag control markers onto each photo to signify where an image should be blended, aligned, or what have you. Once finished, however, the app provides some really stellar results, smoothing and combining images for a seamless panorama.

Drag control markers so that the app can identify common areas and then blend them.You can also choose different projections depending on your desired results. The cylinder projection creates wide scenes up to a full 360 degrees; the sphere projection is for scenes that are both wide and tall; and the fish-eye projection generates flat images for export if the cylindrical or spherical projections yield distortion.

Unfortunately, while you can view your panoramas as flat images or rotatable projections on your iPhone, it seems you can’t export a rotatable panorama. When you want to export, the app will crop it into a 2D panoramic image.

In the end, while this app produces really nice results, it requires time and effort. Dragging the control markers onto the images is very time-consuming, especially if you are using more than 3 images. The app can only shoot single photos (or import them from your Camera Roll) and then stitch them—adding another step to a somewhat convoluted process.

That said, Panoramas might be useful for those who want to put together smoother images without turning to a desktop program for help.

[Jaena Rae Cabrera is a multimedia journalist, bibliophile and Batman-enthusiast. Follow her on Twitter: @jaenarae]

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